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Theory and limited research indicate that race and socioeconomic status (SES) interact dynamically to shape children's developmental contexts and academic achievement, but little scholarship examines how race and SES intersect to shape Black–White achievement gaps across development. We used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 (N ≈ 9,100)—which tracks a nationally representative cohort of children in the United States—to investigate how race and family SES (i.e., parental education and household income) intersect to shape trajectories of academic skills development from kindergarten entry through the spring of eighth grade. Results reveal that household income and parental education were differentially related to academic development, with Black–White gaps narrowing (and Black children's skills growing slightly faster) at higher income gradients but widening (and Black children's skills developing more slowly) at higher levels of educational attainment. Despite performance advantages at kindergarten entry, large baseline disparities meant that higher-income Black students underperformed their White peers by middle school, whereas Black students with better-educated parents consistently trailed their White counterparts. Taken together, these findings suggest that failure to examine how race and SES intersect to shape achievement gaps may obscure complex patterns of educational inequality. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: This study examines how the Black–White achievement gap among U.S. students develops from kindergarten through middle school. Results indicate that the academic returns to family socioeconomic status (SES) differ for Black and White children. Specifically, gaps narrow at higher income levels but grow at higher levels of parental education. This research indicates that socioeconomic advantage may not bestow the same benefits on Black children that it does on White children whereas socioeconomic adversity may not confer equivalent disadvantages on White children as it does on Black children. These findings suggest that the structural and social privileges and constraints related to SES differ for Black and White children and highlight why we must consider how race and SES intersect to shape children's learning experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes discourse about journalists' privilege and libel law from 1894 to 1897 to explain how the press articulated the public policy rationale for legal protection at a pivotal moment in journalism history. To illuminate the relationship between emerging professional values and ideas about law, it applies the analytical lens of institutionalism. The study argues that the public policy rationale that appeared in the legal discourse surrounding these key legal issues was both a function of principled professional identity–building and a means of "institutional maintenance" intended to protect the press's social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Allegations of bribery and corruption in admission to prestigious American colleges brought academics and athletics into the public forum in March 2019. This paper distinguishes illegalities from inequities in the decisions that elite college admissions offices make about student applications. Typically special admission allowances tend to favor outstanding athletes whose academic record may be marginal. The incidents in Varsity Blues indicated a different imbalance: namely, that athletic admission slots, especially in so-called "country club" sports tended to give an admissions edge to applicants who did not show great athletic achievement or potential. These episodes put into bold relief new examples of advantage and privilege in going to college as part of American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the new divides and changing structure of the modern city and metropolis. Since the classic Chicago School models, the urban form of the metropolis has been conceptualized as a divided space, where affluent suburbs surround a less-advantaged and denser urban core. More recently, the concept of a great inversion has been advanced to capture the return of more advantaged groups to the urban center and the outward shift of poverty and disadvantage to the suburbs. To gain insight into contemporary urban form, we undertake a descriptive mapping exercise of the residential locations of three major classes—the advantaged class of knowledge, professionals and creative workers, the declining blue collar working class, and the less advantaged service class of workers—across a dozen of America’s largest metro areas and their core cities. We find a pattern of class division and urban form that we refer to as the “patchwork metropolis,” where class divides cut across city and suburb alike. These divides appear to be conditioned by the location of the advantaged class that occupies and clusters around the most functional and desirable areas of the metropolis—close to the urban core, around transit, near knowledge institutions, and along areas of natural amenities. The less-advantaged classes are shunted into the spaces leftover or in between—either traditionally disadvantaged areas of the inner city or the fringes of the suburban and exurban periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the ways men who identify as stay-at-home fathers in the United States (N = 40) both resist and comply with traditional expectations of masculinities. Through the use of qualitative, in-depth interviews and analysis using grounded theory, participants discuss their desires to change gendered expectations around caregiving while continuing to partake in some of the power and privilege associated with masculinities. Associated contradictions are analyzed through participants' discussions of the use of feminine terms such as "Mr. Mom" or babysitting, participating in mother-only spaces, and gendered expectations of caregiving. Actions of these stay-at-home fathers simultaneously challenge and affirm aspects of hegemonic masculinities. Although by staying home, in some ways, these stay-at-home fathers continue to challenge traditional gender expectations around caregiving, in many ways, they continue to benefit and affirm the power and privilege associated with masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author is a White, native English speaking, formally educated cis person who was raised Episcopalian. The author started critically thinking about issues of privilege and systemic discrimination while working at a non-profit organization, the Food Project. As the author has continued her education on such issues, she has reached an understanding that rather than feeling guilty, she must accept her responsibility to use her privilege to contribute to the dismantling of systems of oppression and challenge disenfranchisement. This piece began as a spoken word exploration into these issues and how one can face them in modern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial categories, inequalities, and hierarchies have shaped life in the United States since the formation of the country. For children and youth in the immigrant and second generations, schools are central sites of racialization. In this article, we focus on what the educational research suggests about the role of schooling in the racialization of ethnically diverse Asian immigrant and refugee groups in the United States. Specifically, we examine how schools have been implicated in the racialization of Asian Americans from immigrant families in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as how Asian immigrant youth have used schooling to respond to the forces of racialization. Through policies of exclusion and segregation in schools, the state often positions Asian Americans as outside the realm of Americanness. Today, in addition to an ongoing image of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, we see racialization processes expressed in the religification of South Asian immigrant students and in the ideological Blackening of some Southeast Asian youth. At the same time, schools have often positioned Asian Americans as model minorities whose academic success is used to argue that US schools are meritocratic and to blame other students of color for their own academic challenges. Our review demonstrates that Asian immigrant students experience racialization in diverse and contradictory ways that intersect with other identities like class, religion, and ethnicity, making the notion of a single Asian American subject problematic. Although it may seem as though Asian Americans are not subjected to racism, due to the model minority stereotype and their relative racial privilege, our review of the literature clearly challenges this assumption. Rather than proof of the absence of racism, the model minority narrative arguably demotes Asian Americans to 2nd-class citizenship, which hinges on the approval of Whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a "status advantage": they are rewarded disproportionately to the quality of their performance. We develop and test a theory of status advantage in meritocratic settings. The most influential model in past research derives status advantage from decision-makers' tendency to infer quality from status when quality is uncertain. The theory developed here integrates and extends this and other theories to explain the emergence of status advantage in the many meritocratic contexts where the decision-maker's personal, first-order sense of quality is less important to the decision. We argue that in such contexts, decision-makers must often coordinate with others to make the "best" decision, and thus they focus on the "third-order inference" problem of discerning who or what "most people" think is higher quality, as encoded in status beliefs. Three experiments demonstrate that under such conditions, status advantages can emerge even though (1) status information does not resolve uncertainty about quality; (2) the status belief is illegitimate; and (3) no party to the decision personally prefers the higher-status option. The theory implies that status hierarchies are resilient in the face of significant dissent but may be subject to public challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual assault on college campuses is a pervasive public health issue. It is important to examine factors particular to universities that influence occurrences of sexual assault and people's perceptions of sexual assault. Using a lens of socialist feminism, we argue that institutional and sociocultural factors related to gender and class privilege on college campuses are due to patterns of power and control in university systems that contribute to the occurrence and facilitation of sexual assault. Our synthesis of the literature focuses on the male-dominated party culture of the primarily White Greek system in American universities, which is reinforced by the university as an institution. We discuss how patterns of power and control dictate and influence contemporary campus norms in relation to gender and class, which then perpetuate sexual assault. We provide recommendations for policies and procedures regarding class and gender inequities in the scope of sexual violence on college campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the obligations to offset race privilege in the U.S. through focusing on the sources that create race privilege and race disadvantage and modifying the status quo.

This case study investigates how kindergarten children thought and talked about their school in three socially stratified school settings: public, charter and private, and the extent to which they grasped sociocultural understandings related to social class. Data included field notes, interviews with the children and teachers, and parent surveys. A Bourdieuian lens illuminated emergent themes. Results indicate that children in the elite setting had developed sophisticated understandings of their privileged social locations and understood their position as distinct from other children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chile has failed to ratify the 1991 International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) as stipulated in the free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States. Since Chile is amongst the US Priority Watch List countries, it is imperative for Chile to emanate a UPOV 1991-compliant law. The ratification of UPOV 1991, however, has encountered strong resistance within the country and it is not yet clear when and how Chile will adopt UPOV 1991 provisions. Through an analysis of legal and economic aspects of the domestic plant variety law, this paper explains that Chile should make better use of UPOV flexibilities and gives recommendations in order to accommodate the interests of all stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how teachers in U.S. classrooms navigate, dialogue, debate, and absorb the ideas of privilege, power, and the presence of various forms of injustices. Through their understanding of these topics, we explore how K-12 teachers engage, disengage, and rationalize issues of social justice in education, society, and their own classrooms. This article utilizes teachers' dialogue through one curricular design used by a group of teacher educators to ensure safety, dialogue, and reflection. Using a grounded theory approach, we find that teachers lie on a continuum somewhere between shirking or embracing their role and responsibilities towards social justice. By highlighting K-12 teachers' understandings and positionalities regarding social justice, this study helps teacher educators charged with preparing teachers to better recognize the challenges we face in bringing social justice curricula to teacher education programs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the convergence of inequality across social and economic dimensions in the United States. Chief among these are wealth accumulation, labor, and education. Specifically, I discuss the transference of wealth to the top of the income hierarchy, the automation and polarization of labor, and threats to public education. Additionally, I implicate neoliberalism in this multidimensional decline of social privileges, and I conclude with a glimpse into a dystopian future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children in therapy have a strong interest in maintaining the confidentiality of communications with their therapists. Without the assurance of confidential communications, children may not be as open with their therapists, which can make therapy less effective. Although children have privilege rights to their psychotherapist-patient communications just as adults do, their parents generally hold and exercise that privilege. Many courts have recognized that a parent should not hold a child's privilege when the parent and child have divergent interests. This raises the question of who should hold the privilege in the parent's place. In L.A.N. v. L.M.B., the Colorado Supreme Court decided the child's guardian ad litem (GAL) should hold the child's privilege. The court reasoned that the GAL's expertise with the particular child and general duties toward the child's best interests made the GAL the appropriate privilege holder. Although other jurisdictions have also ruled this way, some states have instead allowed the trial court to make decisions regarding a child's privilege. Awarding the privilege to the court raises issues of impartiality, expertise, and judicial economy. Designating the GAL as the privilege holder is a better solution because it ensures that the child receives an advocate on the privilege issue whose only goal is representing the child's best interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The Reverend Joseph Lowery and the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus sponsored a 2011 voting rights suit, Lowery v. Deal, that demanded the disincorporation of several majority-white cities in Georgia's Fulton and DeKalb Counties and preemption against attempts by affluent and majority-white north Fulton to secede from the rest of the county. Secession would have severe consequences for racial equity in the metropolitan area. Lowery's 2011 dismissal by the District Court reflects ascendant color-blind racial ideology that defends white privilege in metropolitan space by attributing it to culturally and legally legitimate race-neutral processes. Historical analysis challenges this color-blind interpretation, identifying the nominally class-based interests of north Fulton residents with systemic racial discrimination and the politics of secession with historic patterns of spatial politics that have sought not only to exclude but also to manipulate political space to limit the ability of black voters and officials to make decisions affecting whites and their property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers insight on the white privileges of the pre-service teachers in the U.S. Topics discussed include the multicultural education course-work in the country, the value of teaching with regards to diversity in education, the White privilege, and the reactions and understanding of the white privilege.

Martha Fineman proposes a post-identity "vulnerability" approach that focuses on burdens we all share; this article argues that theory needs to incorporate recognition of how invisible privileges exacerbate some people's burdens. Vulnerability theory is based on a recognition that we are all born defenseless, become feeble, must fear natural disasters, and might be failed by social institutions. It thus argues for a strong state that takes affirmative steps to insure substantive equality of opportunity. While vulnerability theory might help explain and remedy situations like Hurricane Katrina, it also might be susceptible to an argument that racial profiling is a necessary sacrifice of those overrepresented in arrest statistics for the greater good of protecting the majority from vulnerability to crime. I argue that acknowledging relative privilege can help us analyze practices such as racial profiling. Privileges are invisible, unearned assets that automatically attach to people because an aspect of their identity is made socially normative. Because privileges can make the impact of racially targeted policing of others invisible to their holders, vulnerability theory needs to incorporate this concept if it wishes to address racial profiling. A revised vulnerability theory could then use the fact of our shared vulnerabilities and its justification of a strong state to call for extensive federal monitoring of policing. Linking vulnerability theory to analysis of privilege is a necessary precursor to such a conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Wilson argued back in 1978 that by the mid-twentieth century social class mattered more for getting ahead than race, he launched a rigorous scholarly debate about the relative importance of race and class that continues to this day. Since the 1970s, the gap between the black middle class and the black poor has widened, lending credibility to Wilson's claim, but also raising new research questions for scholars to ponder. In this essay, I suggest that extending Wilson's model to include a new period, encompassing the last twenty-five years, would help to illuminate more recent structural advantages that contribute to class privilege in American society as well an emerging fault line within the black middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the scholarship on how marginalised groups deploy human rights discourse focuses on how these groups translate human rights norms into the group’s vernacular. The marginalised are not alone in this respect. The American Christian Right employs the power of rights claims – which they have previously rejected – to preserve Christian privilege at the expense of greater religious inclusion. This paper demonstrates that even the ‘powerful’ need to vernacularise rights norms and ideals when the group has no meaningful history of engaging with rights and the law. This shared process of vernacularisation highlights the plasticity of rights, and how they can be bent to serve the relatively powerful or the relatively powerless. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social class confers a bundle of capabilities, practices, and beliefs that are conventionally assumed to be hierarchical, rigid, and self-perpetuating. However, this framework often belies the fact that these qualities needn't be necessarily or exhaustively advantageous. In particular, social change may render obsolete class-linked characteristics that were advantageous in previous periods. Drawing on interviews with homeowners at risk of foreclosure and a yearlong ethnography of a housing counseling organization, I find that although the housing crisis of the “Great Recession” affected both working- and middle-class homeowners alike, the practices of working-class borrowers better positioned them to exploit a number of informational advantages in the rapidly changing mortgage modification setting. My findings are a departure from existing research that treats middle-class capabilities and practices as intrinsically advantageous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How can access to public elementary schools of variable quality be justly distributed within a school district? Two reasonable criteria are: (a) that children should have equal opportunity to attend high-quality schools, and (b) school assignment policies should foster an overall increase in the number of high-quality schools. This article analyzes Boston Public Schools’ new school assignment plan in light of these criteria. It shows that Boston Public Schools’ plan violates equal opportunity by giving middle-class families privileged access to existing high-quality schools. Boston Public Schools arguably panders to more-advantaged families, however, in order to pull them into the system and deploy their economic, political, and social capital to increase the total number of high-quality schools. Is this ethically defensible? To answer this question, we need to develop an ethical theory of pandering: of privileging the interests and preferences of already unjustly privileged actors because the consequences tend to benefit everyone. Such a theory will need to be ethically pluralistic and weighted along a contextually sensitive continuum, rather than rendered in all-or-nothing terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role that social context plays in mediating racial socialization in upper-middle-class white families. Outcomes of white racial socialization, as well as the process itself, depend in large part on the distinctive racial contexts designed by parents in which white children live and interact. I examine variation in white middle-school-aged children's common-sense racial knowledge and discuss the importance of exploring the social reproduction and reworking of racial ideologies and privilege in childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes toward gay rights have liberalized over the past few decades, but scholars know less about the extent to which individuals in the United States exhibit subtle forms of prejudice toward lesbians and gays. To help address this issue, we offer a conceptualization of formal rights and informal privileges. Using original data from a nationally representative survey experiment, we examine whether people distinguish between formal rights (e.g., partnership benefits) and informal privileges (e.g., public displays of affection) in their attitudes toward same-sex couples. Results show that heterosexuals are as willing to extend formal rights to same-sex couples as they are to unmarried heterosexual couples. However, they are less willing to grant informal privileges. Lesbians and gays are more willing to extend formal rights to same-sex couples, but they too are sometimes more supportive of informal privileges for heterosexual couples. We also find that heterosexuals’ attitudes toward marriage more closely align with their attitudes toward informal privileges than formal rights, whereas lesbians and gays view marriage similarly to both formal rights and informal privileges. Our findings highlight the need to examine multiple dimensions of sexual prejudice to help understand how informal types of prejudice persist as minority groups receive formal rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the role that the racial identity of whites in the U.S. played in the country's social structure from the end of World War II through the early 21st century, including in regard to whites' alleged reluctance to give up their social position of privilege. An overview of the social conditions of U.S. minorities, including in regard to the alleged capitalist exploitation of minority communities and affirmative action programs, is provided.

Studies of collegiate party and hookup culture tend to overlook variation along social class and racial/ethnic lines. Drawing on interview data at a “party school” in the Midwest, I examine the meanings and practices of drinking and casual sex for a group of class and race-diverse fraternity men. While more privileged men draw on ideas of age and gender to construct college as a time to let loose, indulge, and explore, men from disadvantaged backgrounds express greater ambivalence toward partying. For these men, partying presents both opportunities and dilemmas and taps into tensions inherent in being upwardly mobile college men. For some, symbolic abstention from extreme party behavior addresses some of these tensions and validates their place on campus. Men’s talk of collegiate partying reveals the dynamic and relational construction of intersectional identities on campus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Feminist concerns about the epistemological problems of quantitative methods have resulted in an underdevelopment of quantitative approaches that could contribute to existing intersectional theory. Further, feminist scholars commonly consider the effects of gender as it intersects with race or class, but relatively little of this research has included nativity (being either an immigrant or native-born to a society). This article addresses these shortcomings by examining patterns of earnings inequality at the intersection of gender, race, and nativity, comparing cohorts of African-born Black and white immigrants to their US-born counterparts over multiple time-points. Further, the depressive effects of gender are large enough so that while there are differences in women's earnings across race and nativity, nearly all groups of men still earn more than nearly all groups of women. The article's results demonstrate that privilege has a magnifying effect, with the advantages conferred from one privileged status increasing the effects of other privilege statuses, which become larger over time. These findings contribute to how feminists understand privileges and oppressions emerging from the intersections of gender with other social statuses, and how such intersections shape economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of Stand Your Ground laws cynically exploit the image of vulnerable women to defend expansions of self-defense doctrine, despite the fact that such laws actually reinforce and exacerbate existing gender divides in self-defense law that disproportionately harm women. The appropriation of women's right to self-defense by Stand Your Ground supporters masks the law's hostility toward women's use of force and obscures the real achievement of such legislation: the normalization and promotion of (often white) male violence in an ever-expanding variety of scenarios. Battered Women's Syndrome, the chief narrative available to women who fight back, forces women to plead for mercy and subjects their behavior to extensive scrutiny and evaluation. Stand Your Ground, the chief narrative men can now use to justify provoking deadly fights, often allows men to escape evaluation altogether by granting immunity from prosecution and even from arrest. This two-track system of selfdefense-- Battered Women's Syndrome for women and Stand Your Ground for men--has far-reaching implications outside of the courtroom. Battered Women's Syndrome sends the legal and social message that women should retreat even from their own homes in the face of objective, repeated harm to their bodies; Stand Your Ground sends the legal and social message that men can advance against strangers anywhere on the basis of vague, subjective perceptions of threats. Male violence is not only tolerated, but celebrated; women's violence is not only discouraged, but stigmatized. Invoking the image of vulnerable women to promote aggressive self-defense rhetoric serves to distract from the reality that violence remains chiefly a male privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I examine the use of the concept of privilege within the critical theoretical discourse on oppression and liberation (with a particular focus on white privilege and antiracism in the USA). In order to fulfill the rhetorical aims of liberation, concepts for privilege must meet what I term the ‘boundary condition’, which demarcates the boundary between a privileged elite and the rest of society, and the ‘ignorance condition’, which establishes that the elite status and the advantages it confers are not publicly recognised or affirmed. I argue that the dominant use of the concept of privilege cannot fulfill these conditions. As a result, while I do not advocate for the complete abandonment of the rhetoric of privilege, I conclude that it obscures as much as it illuminates, and that the critical theoretical discourse on liberation and oppression should be suspicious of its use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon two ethnographic studies of affluent and elite co-educational secondary schools in the United States, Weis and Cipollone spotlight the explicit ‘class work’ of a now highly insecure middle/upper middle class, as they attempt to maintain advantage via entrance to particularly located post-secondary destinations. Affirming the notion that class position must now be ‘won’ at both the individual and collective level, rather than constituting the ‘manner to which one is born,’ the authors track and theorize intensified preparation for and application to particular kinds of post-secondary destinations in an increasingly segmented national and international marketplace for higher education. Although the US media have taken note of such ‘application frenzy,’ little scholarly work tracks and theorizes this ‘frenzy’ as a distinctly ‘class process,’ one that represents intensified ‘class work’ at one and the same time as class ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ become ever more apparent in the larger global arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While sociologists have shown how employers contribute to occupational segregation along lines of race, gender, and nativity, little attention has been paid to unpacking why employers engage in those practices. We take on this gap through a case study of hired labor relations on Wisconsin dairy farms, which have become segregated along lines of nativity and race in recent years. We ask how these workplaces have become segregated, what employers' roles in this process have been, and why, in particular, employers have engaged in practices that contribute to workplace inequalities. We find that employers engage in practices that leave immigrant workers clustered in the low-end jobs for a complex array of reasons: to maintain profits within a changing industry context, meet their own middle-class aspirations, comply with their peers' middle-class lifestyle expectations, manage their own concerns about immigration policing, assert their own class identity, justify the privileges that they and their U.S.-born employees enjoy on the farm, and maintain the advantages they have gained. We argue that sociologists seeking to explain employers' roles in occupational segregation must examine not only the stories employers tell about different worker groups but also the stories they tell about themselves and the contexts that shape their aspirations and identities. Doing so provides more complete explanations for why occupational segregation occurs and does the important work of bringing whiteness into the spotlight and showing how privilege is quietly constructed and defended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that classical liberal autonomy does not exist in the U.S. legal system, hence the system built on this foundation represents an unjust legal system. It presents insights into the book entitled "Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America" by professor Stephanie M. Wildman. It informs that the book deals with systemic privilege in different domains including in workplace, biomedicine, and residential housing.

In the past few decades, a diverse body of scholarship has complicated the image of American suburbs as spaces of white, middle-class homogeneity. Revisionist suburban histories and accounts of African American and immigrant suburbanization have drawn attention to the longstanding presence of non-white others in US suburbs. Yet despite diversification, white privilege remains deeply entrenched in suburbia. This article explores the shifting character of white privilege in the US - especially in the US South - and asks how whites interpret diversity and identify those with whom they are, or are not, willing to share their privileges. This article uses the results of a pilot study in a subdivision near Columbia, South Carolina, to explore how white suburbanites articulate belonging in neighborhood space. This discussion highlights the ways in which respondents reject the pre-civil-rights order marked by overt racial discrimination, but also reveals the ways in which they evaluate the relative merit of minority groups and identify certain differences as unacceptable. While limited in scope, this study encourages scholars to further explore the ways in which shifting configurations of race become intertwined with processes of contemporary suburban change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of dynastic political privilege on the behavior of incumbents. Incumbents have opportunities to serve themselves at the expense of voters, but society can design political institutions to mitigate these principal-agent problems. Dynastic political privilege may be one such mechanism. We argue that the possibility that opportunistic behavior in office may damage family members' political prospects disciplines incumbents. We test this hypothesis using data for 1950-2005 on U.S. governors, including a new data set on the family relationships of politicians, and find that dynastic political privilege increases incumbent accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the imperatives of postfeminism, specifically the dual mandates of what Shelley Budgeon (2011) calls "successful femininity": self-invention and self-regulation. Using examples from contemporary American middlebrow fashion culture, it analyzes the way postfeminist ideology requires its subjects to fulfill these mandates by both following and breaking rules. Through this analysis, the article argues that a key feature of postfeminism is a detachment toward rules and those who follow them, which it traces to both an earlier feminist skepticism toward norms and a pronounced anxiety in middlebrow culture over femininity and individuality. It further argues that this detachment is an iteration of class privilege and is enacted through class violence, suggesting that postfeminism is above all a phenomenon of class as much as gender. Ultimately, the article argues that a postfeminist celebration of rule-breaking as a practice of successful femininity leads to inaccurate and dangerous notions of women's agency, vividly exemplified in the figure of Sarah Palin, whose rogue affect both claims and disavows feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that focuses on use of the autobiography "White Like Me" by Tim Wise to teach college students about race in the U.S. and the concepts of white privilege and white isolation. It explores the book's treatment of white identity on personal and social levels, and the author examines white identity in American higher education. Students' self-awareness concerning race and their attitudes toward racial healing and reconciliation are also considered.

This study investigates the radio roots of a discourse of domestic whiteness that is typically associated with family sitcoms of the 1950s. Through analysis of a highly popular evening serial, One Man's Family (NBC, 1932-1959), the article tracks the production of domestic whiteness in sound, narrative, and vocal performance, situating it within the institutional and social contexts of 1930s radio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments examined effects of heightened awareness of white privilege (illegitimate advantages held by White Americans) and efficacy to reduce racial inequality on White American college students' attitudes toward African Americans and White Americans. Efficacy to reduce inequality was either measured (Experiment 1) or manipulated (Experiment 2), and heightened white privilege awareness (WPA) was either manipulated (Experiment 1) or held constant (Experiment 2). All participants, except control participants in Experiment 1, read a passage describing their university's under-representation of African American faculty. Afterward, they wrote letters in support of hiring more African American faculty and were told there was either a 95% or 5% chance their actions would be effective (Experiment 2) or were simply thanked and their perceived efficacy concerning change measured (Experiment 1). Heightened WPA and higher efficacy (measured and manipulated) independently improved participants' attitudes toward African Americans, but had no effect on their attitudes toward White Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on racism and inequality in the U.S. and focuses on the academic perspectives of this problem. It discusses the personal damages due to white privileges and the inequality persisting in the public schools of the U.S. It further discusses colour-blindness, racial silencing and threat of racial division or balkanization on social cohesion with reference to several trails of equality in schools.

The article examines the effects of white privilege on U.S. feminist scholarship. Particular focus is given to the development and effects of the analytical categories of third world women and women of color. According to the author, these categories, intended to be inclusive, have in fact contributed to the marginalization of scholarship by and about black women and of U.S. black women themselves. It is suggested that in subsuming U.S. black women under these larger categories, U.S. feminists have created an environment in which scholarship on the concerns of U.S. black women is seen as particularist and is dismissed. Other topics include the feminist periodical "Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society," discursive formations, and intersectionality theory.

In this article, the author focuses on the need of the State Secrets Protection Act (SSPA) of the U.S. for establishing a set of uniform court procedures that provide assistance in determining the proper limitations to a limitless defense of the U.S. government. He examines the effectiveness of SSPA guidance to courts for reviewing the privilege's invocation and misapplications of the privilege by the U.S. President Barack Obama's administration.